420011 SE Quantity as a literary and a critical category (2022S)

For a long time, quantity was the stepchild of the categories of the humanities. The measurement of any kind of quantity, of volumes of verse, text or time, is considered positivistic and is underprivileged compared to quality, which apparently empowers the evaluating subject. But it is part of the self-enlightenment of literary studies to mark where, how and to what extent quantitative aspects and methods determine our perception of literature. Thus, quantity is, for example, about text length and reception duration, about 'long' vs. 'short' genres and the effect of these text dimensions, about multiplicity as a theme of literature, e.g. in the simulation of mass (metropolitan novel), about totality as the goal of such simulations, about quantification in the social-scientific study of literature (distribution, reception, evaluation), about the abbreviated recording of complex phenomena due to large amounts of data and the representation of quantitative results in diagrams. The boom of the digital humanities in recent years has also provided the quantitative episteme with tools, so that the sessions will now be about comparing the traditional epistemological interest or special research questions such as those indicated above with the current state of methodology.